What Mason Knew

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood makes coming of age feel new again.

Boyhood took 12 years, in film as in life. For 12
years, director Richard Linklater shot the movie for a few weeks each
summer as both the main character, a boy named Mason, and the actor,
Ellar Coltrane, came of age, from 6 to 18. The epic undertaking has
resulted in one of the most honest and absorbing representations of
growing up ever put to film: all the tedium, all the wonder. All story,
no plot.

Or maybe—judging also from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life—growing up is just more beautiful in Texas. The sun shines more, and it’s always golden hour.

Like a lot of kids,
Mason is shiftless. He likes video games. He likes trampolines and bikes
and, eventually, girls. You feel, through his eyes, the deep mysteries
contained in his mother’s Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the singular
injustice of having an older sister—played by Linklater’s daughter,
Lorelei—who is way better at lying than he is.

We see him in a
series of moments, and they blend into each other without announcement.
New haircuts appear. Obama runs for president. We see a teen girl
awkwardly saying that “a friend” has a crush on Mason, and then we see
her as Mason’s first girlfriend. It feels like memory, except we don’t
know how it ends.

The passage of time
amounts to a special effect more powerful than CGI. How did this wistful
kid with sun in his cheeks become a lanky, zitty teen with an
ill-advised mustache? And when did he get so handsome? Who bought him
that skateboard? Holy shit, they’re wearing Tevas and watching Dragonball Z.
As in life, the moments pass naturally, effortlessly, but in their
accumulation we see—with all the suddenness of epiphany—that we have
changed. The realization is startling, wondrous and sad, as in
Linklater’s Before Sunrise trilogy, where the passage of time also shows up on the actors’ faces.

At its heart, though, Boyhood
is less about boyhood than parenthood. Much of the viewer’s empathy
lies with Patricia Arquette, who plays a mother struggling to raise two
kids mostly on her own, with the occasional incursions of men. “Men”
includes absentee dad Ethan Hawke, who plays Ethan Hawke.

As in What Maisie Knew,
we see these fumbling attempts at parenthood only through the eyes of
the child. In one powerful scene, Mason comes home to find his mother
weeping on the floor. She tells her son she slipped and fell. The
stepfather, looming nearby, tells him the same. It is the film’s only
flirtation with melodrama, but because the situation is developed so
patiently, it has the queasy, awful feeling of reality.

In Boyhood,
the world of men is often either terrible or useless to children. An
early shot shows the mother’s very tall boyfriend from the low camera
angle of a child. He looks terrifying, and not just because of his awful
goatee, as he complains that Arquette couldn’t find a babysitter. From a
child’s view, the drunken parade of suitors and stepdads do little, see
only failure, and pity only themselves. And even though the love of
philosopher-dad-by-weekend Ethan Hawke is palpable—beautiful, really—he
doesn’t learn how to be a real father until he starts a different
family, with a different wife. Oh, the unfairness.

Just as the parents
grow up with the children, the film becomes increasingly aware of itself
as it progresses. When Mason leaves for college, his mom suffers a
breakdown. “My life is going to go,” she says, “just like that, nothing
more than a series of events.” Mason grows up, he graduates, and now
there’s no more for her to do. She’s written out of the movie: “You know
what’s next? My funeral.”

“Aren’t you jumping
ahead like 40 years?” Mason asks, in a sly wink to the audience. But we
are being abandoned, too. This movie makes parents of us all, and the
three hours have passed too quickly. An entire world of possibility will
stretch out in front of him, but we who watched him grow will be left
behind as the credits roll, grateful and a little brokenhearted.